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How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake?

In 1972, a year before his death in a plane crash at 35, the artist Robert Smithson wrote, “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day.” And with the creation of his greatest work — “Spiral Jetty,” the huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — he certainly put that conviction to the test.

After the piece was constructed in 1970, it spent decades underwater as the lake rose. It has re-emerged in the last few years because of drought, but its appearance has changed markedly, whitened by salt crystals and the buildup of silt. Mr. Smithson, who was fascinated by the concept of entropy, might have welcomed this transformation. But it is less clear what he would have thought about changes wrought by visitors to the remote site, who have, at times, carried off some of the rocks as art souvenirs. Or moved them to construct their own tiny spiral jetties nearby. Or, in one case, used them to spell out what they were undoubtedly drinking at the time — “BEER” — in the pink-hued sand next to the earthwork.

Issues like this recently prompted the Dia Art Foundation, which owns the work, to begin exploring the idea of systematically documenting the site, photographing it from year to year to give curators and conservators a better idea of how it is changing and a better basis for making decisions — always tricky in the world of land art — about whether to intervene.

“In my field we’re trained to make condition reports,” said Francesca Esmay, Dia’s conservator, but she added of Smithson’s work, composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: “Its scale is such that I can’t just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it.” So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.

After considering nearly every possible way to document “Spiral Jetty” from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

Photo

An aerial view of Robert Smithson's “Spiral Jetty” in Utah, taken by a camera attached to a latex weather balloon from about 800 feet in the air.Credit
Eppich, Esmay and Tang: Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Along with a little helium, some fishing line, a slightly hacked Canon PowerShot G9 point-and-shoot digital camera, an improvised plywood and metal cradle for the camera and some plastic zip ties (to keep the cradle attached and the neck of the balloon cinched), a floating land-art documentation machine was improvised, MacGyver-like.

“I’m not supposed to use the word cheap — it’s inexpensive,” Rand Eppich, a senior project manager with the Getty institute, said. Mr. Eppich, who conceived the balloon plan, made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Salt Lake City last May with a Getty assistant, Aurora Tang, and Ms. Esmay, to put the system in use for the first time.

And despite a couple of balloons that popped in the Utah heat (“Thankfully, we didn’t have cameras on them,” Mr. Eppich said), the three managed to get some spectacular and highly useful shots of the jetty from heights ranging from 800 to 1,600 feet, as they unreeled the fishing line tied to the balloon, allowing it to rise.

“You don’t need to be skilled conservators to do this part — it’s literally like remembering back to childhood birthday parties,” said Ms. Esmay, who joined Dia three years ago as its first full-time conservator. She is also responsible for the condition of sites like Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field” in western New Mexico and for works by artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Louise Bourgeois at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y.

Mr. Eppich said the Getty’s goal was to create a system that Dia could use annually at little cost and one simple enough that Ms. Esmay could operate it herself. “We want to help people do something that’s repeatable and sustainable after we’re gone,” he said.

Preservation concerns about “Spiral Jetty” have arisen lately not only because of the work’s re-emergence from the water but also because of plans announced in the last two and a half years by companies to initiate industrial projects near the site. One is a large expansion of a field of solar evaporation ponds used to extract potassium sulfate from the water for fertilizer. Another is a plan for exploratory oil drilling that Dia officials argued would disrupt the way the work would be viewed and potentially harm it physically. As a result of the drilling proposal — currently in limbo — Dia and Utah officials have begun exploring the creation of a buffer zone around the sculpture that would help protect it while still allowing the lake area to be used for other purposes.

But in addition to industrial threats to the work, there are also natural ones, like silt, which has begun to accumulate between the outermost band of the spiral and the next one in, as the lake’s level has dropped. The lake is so low it is now possible to walk a quarter-mile into it with the water reaching only knee-high.

“In my personal opinion alone,” Ms. Esmay said of the silt, “I think it’s to such a degree now that it’s foreign to the piece. But in 10 years it could be gone or in one year it could be gone. Or it could be worse. You have no way of knowing, and that’s just inherent to the work itself.”

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She emphasized that the documentation project was not a prelude to any active plans to rebuild or even touch up the jetty. “Something like that might not happen for 20 years, if it ever happens at all,” she said, “but at least we’ll have 20 years of data that will show the patterns of change.”

And if any conservation plans were to go forward, then the really complicated work would begin: trying to figure out what Mr. Smithson would have thought about it.

“Nature does not proceed in a straight line,” he wrote. “It is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2009, on Page C1 of the National edition with the headline: How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe